a little person in all of us

In the eighties it seemed like the in thing was “therapy”. I remember living in California in my late teens and early twenties, and everyone talking about their therapist. The catch phrase at the time was “inner child”. Everyone seemed to have an “inner child” that needed to be gotten a hold of. At the time I thought it was a strange notion, a little kid trapped inside a giant adult body. Was this like the old commercials they used to play? “Inside every fat person is a skinny person trying to get out”? I imagined my little child in there, longing for the crayons as I walked around the grocery store buying only adult foods, like diet soda and salads and wheat toast. And here is my inner child, trying desperately to force my legs over to the aisle with the coloring books and stickers and markers. Really though, understanding myself a bit better now, it sort of IS like that. I do sometimes have little ones vying for their own time.

My view of my condition is sort of like driving in a carpool. Have I said this before here? Because I sometimes forget. So let’s say there are a bunch of people in a car – a bunch of me, for example. Someone has to do the driving – get me to work on time, pick up some beer on the way home, remember which house to go into. It used to be that whomever was driving the body was the only one I knew about. If I “shifted” from one personality to the next, there was no one else to really understand or observe this. Or at least, no one I was aware of. I left one personality, spent some time at a “wiping clean” place, and then went from there. I might go into this more later because it probably doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve read books about this kind of thing, but basically, most of the people in “my car” were unaware of each other. Like a bunch of kids in the back seat, fast asleep, while someone else drives along. Over time, more of my personalities have become aware of each other, and now it’s more like a Chinese Fire Drill, or a team effort to get things done.

This all probably sounds pretty weird to you, and hey, it’s weird on this end as well. But I’m getting used to it. Still, there is a lot of adapting I have to do. I need to get to know these different personalities, and their individual quirks. Like the person who tries to throw me down the stairs whenever she is out. I’ve had a number of falls down stairs because of this, and frequently miss a few steps at the end of the staircase when I’m not paying attention, because she seems to be into the whole Alfred Hitchcock murder scene or something. I have to look out for the resident klutz as well, as she can trip over extra long carpet fibers and dangerously protruding dust bunnies. I don’t want to say that this personality isn’t bright, but definitely not terribly aware of her surroundings. I have a grumpy girl, who frowns more often than she blinks; a gasping girl, who sounds like she might die if she has to use her own energy to go into the kitchen to get a glass of water; a giggly girl, a tomboy, and Tiger.

Not that there aren’t more than that, but Tiger is the one that really sealed the deal. For a while I was struggling with this whole idea of MPD. Though, if you’ve read my other blogs you’ll know that I was actually previously diagnosed, about fifteen years prior to the more recent diagnosis. Still, one of the me’s out and about didn’t believe there were more me’s than just me. She thought we were making it up. Or trying to get attention. Or crazy. Just crazy in the way that would make you invent something like MPD and pretend that you had it for some reason.

Then one day, on the way to therapy, something troubled me. A car of stupid youthful boys drove by, with their annoying and thumping music blaring so loud that the windows of the nearby fast food restaurant shook and clattered. I was already feeling a little peevish, and that seemed to be the last sudden straw. I started to growl at the car. I furrowed my eyebrows, lowered my head, and began growling a little guttural snarl at the youthful offenders. I growled as we drove alongside them, frowning my eyeballs toward them. I growled as we passed them, and turned down another street. I growled down the road, and past the street lights, and changed my growl to a Cat Woman meow as we drove past a police car (men in uniform. even as a multiple, I still have a unified appreciation for the opposite sex). I growled the entire car ride to my therapist (my sister was driving) and didn’t stop even in my session. My sister went with me to this session, because – obviously – I couldn’t talk for a while. I was too busy growling.

Eventually something made me laugh, and I started to come out of that personality, Tiger. Tiger is just a little scratch of a thing. My father started calling me Tiger I don’t know when. But he used to prop me up on a table when we were out at a restaurant or coffee shop, and call me Tiger, and ask me what I was. And I would growl, and snarl at him, “Rawwrr, I’n a Tiger”, because I couldn’t have been more than two or three. Anyway, Tiger really existed. Probably one of my first personalities, if not THE first. I don’t know. But because I’d already heard these stories from my dad, I knew about Tiger. And here she was one day, growling out of my face.

On some level, it seemed other of my personalities were aware of this. Aware that the physical body was growling, and that someone else had hold of the body, and was making it growl. But the conscious personalities, that might be thinking, “hey, that cop has a pretty nice ass”, couldn’t seem to communicate to Tiger. Tiger couldn’t hear any of these other thoughts people. I suppose maybe it’s like the devil on one shoulder, and the angel on the other. You might want to do something, but doubt you can do it, and then yell at yourself for being a weenie. Your mind can take on a devil’s advocate within itself. My mind seemed to want to snap myself out of this silly growling. If you do something silly in front of people, you mentally scold yourself, saying “crikies, THAT’S not going to go over well”. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself from being this little animal. This frowning, grumpy, snarling little kid that didn’t seem to think it odd at all that a grown woman was emitting these noises in a professional office building.

And that’s when it happened. I finally admitted it. I am a Multiple Personality. And really, being a little tiger isn’t so bad. I’m kind of cute. And finally, after all these years, I’m figuring out how to manage my life. So I guess, despite all my eye rolling and nay saying, getting in touch with your inner child isn’t such a horrible thing after all.

I usually just let me inner child do his thing. Whether it’s jumping up and down on my bed or head banging to heavy metal. Life is too short to take seriously. Always hang onto that inner child and don’t be afraid to unleash it. It can make for a fun time. 🙂